AIR: Complex Instruction Generation via Automatic Iterative Refinement
Wei Liu, Yancheng He, Yu Li, Hui Huang, Chengwei Hu, Jiaheng Liu, Shilong Li, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
Abstract
With the development of large language models, their ability to follow simple instructions has significantly improved.However, adhering to complex instructions remains a major challenge.Current approaches to generating complex instructions are often irrelevant to the current instruction requirements or suffer from limited scalability and diversity.Moreover, methods such as back-translation, while effective for simple instruction generation, fail to leverage the rich knowledge and formatting in human written documents.In this paper, we propose a novel Automatic Iterative Refinement (AIR) framework to generate complex instructions with constraints, which not only better reflects the requirements of real scenarios but also significantly enhances LLMs' ability to follow complex instructions.The AIR framework consists of two stages: 1) Generate an initial instruction from a document; 2) Iteratively refine instructions with LLM-as-judge guidance by comparing the model's output with the document to incorporate valuable constraints.Finally, we construct the AIR-10K dataset with 10K complex instructions and demonstrate that instructions generated with our approach significantly improve the model's ability to follow complex instructions, outperforming existing methods for instruction generation 1 .1 Codes and data are available at https://github.com/ WeiLiuAH/AIR-Automatic-Iterative-Refinement.Help me to write an advertisement line for laptop. Initial InstructionPower up your productivity and unleash creativity with our cutting-edge laptop-where performance meets portability!make the line with around 10 words.C1 Unleash your potential with speed, style, and innovation.Savior: Unleash the power of innovation in your hands.Savior: Unleash epic gaming performance with cutting-edge power and immersive visuals refer to the name of the laptop as savior.C2 C3 emphasize its gaming performance.C3
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Cited by top-tier papers5
- Incentivizing Reasoning for Advanced Instruction-Following of Large Language ModelsYulei Qin, Gang Li, Zongyi Li, Zihan Xu et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 17 citations
- RECAST: Expanding the Boundaries of LLMs' Complex Instruction Following with Multi-Constraint DataZhengkang Guo, Wenhao Liu, Mingchen Xie, Jingwen Xu et al.ICLR 2026 · 13 citations
- Replay Failures as Successes: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Instruction FollowingKongcheng Zhang, QI YAO, Shunyu Liu, Wenjian Zhang et al.ICML 2026 · 4 citations
- ELLMob: Event-Driven Human Mobility Generation with Self-Aligned LLM FrameworkYusong Wang, Chuang Yang, Jiawei Wang, Xiaohang Xu et al.ICLR 2026 · 2 citations
- DecIF: Improving Instruction-Following through DecompositionTingfeng Hui, Pengyu Zhu, Bowen Ping, Ling Tang et al.ACL 2026
Builds on13
- Measuring Massive Multitask Language UnderstandingDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou et al.ICLR 2021 · 7,905 citations
- Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-FeedbackAman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 4,972 citations
- Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated InstructionsYizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu et al.ACL 2023 · 540 citations
- What Makes Good Data for Alignment? A Comprehensive Study of Automatic Data Selection in Instruction TuningWei Liu, Weihao Zeng, Keqing He, Yong Jiang et al.ICLR 2024 · 369 citations
- Self-Alignment with Instruction BacktranslationXian Li, Ping Yu, Chunting Zhou, Timo Schick et al.ICLR 2024 · 174 citations
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